Letters and graphics in this month's mailbag

It's certainly been an interesting few weeks for me, personally, as a member of the Spectrum Media team. As many of you know from a story from about four weeks ago now, our previous publisher, Donnie Welch, resigned to pursue some other business interests.

As the interim publisher, I've been getting a crash course on a number of matters within our business that I otherwise wouldn't have a part in as an editor. Luckily, I'm finding that paying attention in meetings and not being afraid to ask questions in the past is paying off. While I'm learning a lot, I'm not as lacking in knowledge as I suppose I could have been.

So while I've been focused a lot more on the ins and outs of advertising, printing and marketing the past few weeks, I also realized I owed all of you a mailbag column. So, here we go.

? Letter error - Let me start by apologizing for not catching an error. Actually, I caught the error. I got sidetracked and forgot to go back to fix it before the error got into print.

We published a letter from a St. George resident that said the following in its opening sentence: "Now that Gov. Mitt Romney has declared that same-sex marriages are no longer a sin against God but a 'family affair,' will the prophet of his church endorse that statement?"

There's no way to check every fact in every letter. We receive a half dozen each day, and with all of the other duties involved in producing a daily website and print newspaper, there simply aren't enough hours in every day.

That said, I do my best to catch as many errors as possible. I saw the error in this one, took a phone call, had a visitor drop in without an appointment and then forgot to go back and make the correction. Completely my fault.

? Graphics - Some stories lend themselves well to graphics. We published one that looked at the tuition amounts for Utah colleges and universities.

The graphic showed in-state and out-of-state amounts, with each college's bar graph appropriately shaded in one of the school's colors.

A local reader emailed the reporter on the story pointing out what he called an "embarrassment to The Spectrum." His beef? The bars weren't proportionate.

True, had the out-of-state graphic had a baseline of zero, the bars would have been wrong. But because of space, we started with the far left being $10,000. Otherwise, the bars would have been correctly proportioned.

To be fair, though, we should have put in the graphic that the stats started at $10,000.

This is a good example of our business is different than many others. When something is in print, it can be studied over and over. Mistakes don't simply fade away like they do on TV.

Contact Editor Todd Seifert at 674-6235, or via email at tseifert@thespectrum.com. Follow him at www.twitter.com/ToddSeifert.

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Letters and graphics in this month's mailbag

It's certainly been an interesting few weeks for me, personally, as a member of the Spectrum Media team.